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What happens when we work non-stop

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Re: What happens when we work non-stop

#31

Post by xaranke »

zasz wrote: post #29
mancerayder wrote: post #27

There are a number of factors such as psychological ones that play a role here, but one major one is distributed teams. I'll go into below what my solution is to the whole off-hours problem is. As a DevOps guy, you have to bail people out of situations or assist with a scary release (because things are rarely sufficiently automated, it takes years to convince management and fix tech debt, especially in a startup). Fo…

Yup, that's how I feel about ever being on-call again. I used to be part of a four-man rotation for a set of services that regularly went down 2-3x times during sleeping hours. This was really rough as a lifelong insomniac. I could never fall back asleep again after being woken up, and was basically a zombie. (And before anyone asks, I've done a sleep study, melatonin, seen a therapist, tried SSRIs, light therapy, in…

Was there a way to fix the services so that you wouldn't get woken up in the middle of the night?

Re: What happens when we work non-stop

#32

Post by uxcolumbo »

zasz wrote: post #29
mancerayder wrote: post #27

There are a number of factors such as psychological ones that play a role here, but one major one is distributed teams. I'll go into below what my solution is to the whole off-hours problem is. As a DevOps guy, you have to bail people out of situations or assist with a scary release (because things are rarely sufficiently automated, it takes years to convince management and fix tech debt, especially in a startup). Fo…

Yup, that's how I feel about ever being on-call again. I used to be part of a four-man rotation for a set of services that regularly went down 2-3x times during sleeping hours. This was really rough as a lifelong insomniac. I could never fall back asleep again after being woken up, and was basically a zombie. (And before anyone asks, I've done a sleep study, melatonin, seen a therapist, tried SSRIs, light therapy, in…

Have you tried CBD?

https://www.thesleepdoctor.com/2017/08/10/understanding-cbd/

Re: What happens when we work non-stop

#33

Post by pm90 »

gordaco wrote: post #28
k_wantified wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about if your relationships and mental health are terrible, so you work to ease the pain of that?

That's a bit like... your relationships and mental health are terrible, so you take drugs (especially alcohol) to ease the pain of that. It might get you some temporary relief, but in the long run the consequences might be far worse than the original problem(s) you were running away from.

Well put!

Its easy to think that using work as a distraction (rather than something destructive like excessive alcohol or drugs) may be OK, but its really not. And most employers will more than willingly accept you working all the time.

Don't fall into the trap. Work is very important, and yes you will work really hard sometimes for time-sensitive things and on-call duties. But it should be understood that those things are anomalies, not something to be expected all the time.

Re: What happens when we work non-stop

#35

Post by mancerayder »

zasz wrote: post #29
mancerayder wrote: post #27

There are a number of factors such as psychological ones that play a role here, but one major one is distributed teams. I'll go into below what my solution is to the whole off-hours problem is. As a DevOps guy, you have to bail people out of situations or assist with a scary release (because things are rarely sufficiently automated, it takes years to convince management and fix tech debt, especially in a startup). Fo…

Yup, that's how I feel about ever being on-call again. I used to be part of a four-man rotation for a set of services that regularly went down 2-3x times during sleeping hours. This was really rough as a lifelong insomniac. I could never fall back asleep again after being woken up, and was basically a zombie. (And before anyone asks, I've done a sleep study, melatonin, seen a therapist, tried SSRIs, light therapy, in…

That's funny that you mention sleep issues.

As a guy who was also on-call in rotations for many years (which is why I wrote the rant above), the biggest issue with on-call was waking up and not being able to sleep, even when the problem (eg., disk partition filling up) took 5 minutes to fix. The way I dealt with that was coming in late the next day. Like very late. Sometimes at 2pm, to leave at 6. Even if the problem took 5 minutes to fix, my insomnia cost me 4 hours of sleep, so now the company better pay up.

And I encourage everyone to behave this way.

Re: What happens when we work non-stop

#36

Post by Twirrim »

sebazzz wrote: post #2

I see this happening with direct collegues of mine. Working in the weekend, working in the evening. Even parttimers running constant overtime, when it doesn't appear to be necessary. Having a few work-related phone calls even on holiday. I believe this creates a constant "attachment" to work, and does not allow you to detach. Especially on holidays you should be able to detach and be able to forget work for a few wee…

My team has got used to me politely grumbling at them if I catch them working out of hours or while on vacation. At the very least, if they do that I strongly encourage them not to submit code reviews or other more visible actions.

Managers in the chain start bugging people about taking time off as soon as extra hours are worked. Setting the culture for the team early on, _and_ enforcing it, is critical. Luckily I've been there since the team was formed, and have enough seniority that people listen.

That said, there are co-workers that just won't stop working all hours, but they've at least stopped pushing code reviews etc at all hours of the day.

Re: What happens when we work non-stop

#38

Post by zasz »

xaranke wrote: post #31
zasz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, that's how I feel about ever being on-call again. I used to be part of a four-man rotation for a set of services that regularly went down 2-3x times during sleeping hours. This was really rough as a lifelong insomniac. I could never fall back asleep again after being woken up, and was basically a zombie. (And before anyone asks, I've done a sleep study, melatonin, seen a therapist, tried SSRIs, light therapy, in…

Was there a way to fix the services so that you wouldn't get woken up in the middle of the night?

Not entirely. Some issues were fixable, like moving our RabbitMQ cluster away from RHEL to AWS. But others weren't. There was an upstream service we depended on that went down, that caused a cascading failure. It was the company's core product, a massive Java program running on bare metal that frequently OOM-killed our service, and even though it was the big money-maker, no team owned it, and nobody understood how it worked. I don't remember why our service had to share a host with this monster, but there was a good reason and it just couldn't be worked around.

Re: What happens when we work non-stop

#39

Post by zasz »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #32
zasz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, that's how I feel about ever being on-call again. I used to be part of a four-man rotation for a set of services that regularly went down 2-3x times during sleeping hours. This was really rough as a lifelong insomniac. I could never fall back asleep again after being woken up, and was basically a zombie. (And before anyone asks, I've done a sleep study, melatonin, seen a therapist, tried SSRIs, light therapy, in…

Have you tried CBD? https://www.thesleepdoctor.com/2017/08/10/understanding-cbd/

I have tried weed, and I really, really dislike the sensation of being high. Just assume that whatever possible drug intervention is out there, I've already tried.

Re: What happens when we work non-stop

#40

Post by zasz »

mancerayder wrote: post #35
zasz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, that's how I feel about ever being on-call again. I used to be part of a four-man rotation for a set of services that regularly went down 2-3x times during sleeping hours. This was really rough as a lifelong insomniac. I could never fall back asleep again after being woken up, and was basically a zombie. (And before anyone asks, I've done a sleep study, melatonin, seen a therapist, tried SSRIs, light therapy, in…

That's funny that you mention sleep issues. As a guy who was also on-call in rotations for many years (which is why I wrote the rant above), the biggest issue with on-call was waking up and not being able to sleep, even when the problem (eg., disk partition filling up) took 5 minutes to fix. The way I dealt with that was coming in late the next day. Like very late. Sometimes at 2pm, to leave at 6. Even if the problem…

I did exactly the same thing! I couldn't believe it that my boss was okay with it!
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